Destination: The Americas
Brazil
Entre Rios | Sao Paulo | Immigration
A Lost Homeland, a Reinvented Homeland: Diaspora and the ‘Culture of Memory’ in the Colony of Danube Swabians of Entre Rios by Méri Frotscher, 14 August 2015 German History, Volume 33, Issue 3, Sept 2015, Pages 439–461
I. Refugees and Colonizers: The Danube Swabians in Entre Rios
Among those expelled from their homelands (Heimatvertriebenen) because of World War II were the Donauschwaben, descendants of emigrants from the Palatinate, Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria and Alsace, who in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries colonized areas of the Middle Danube Valley to protect that area of the Habsburg frontier from renewed attacks by the Turks. The collective signifier of ‘Danube Swabians’ was coined much later, perhaps as late as 1922, by the geographer Robert Sieger at the University of Graz.8
With the fall of the Danube monarchy in 1918, the area colonized by the Danube Swabians was divided between three states, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania. During World War II, after the German occupation of Yugoslavia, many Danube Swabians served in the Prinz Eugen Division of the Waffen-SS, created in 1942 to fight partisans.9 With the fall of the Danube monarchy in 1918, the area colonized by the Danube Swabians was divided between three states, Yugoslavia, Hungary and Romania. During World War II, after the German occupation of Yugoslavia, many Danube Swabians served in the Prinz Eugen Division of the Waffen-SS, created in 1942 to fight partisans.10
After the war, most of the Danube Swabians who left Europe emigrated to the United States, Canada, Argentina, Australia and Brazil. In 1951, about 500 families who were living in a stateless condition in Austria, some of them in refugee camps, were sent to southern Brazil with the help of three relief organizations: Swiss Aid to Europe ( Schweizer Europahilfe ), Swiss Caritas and the Donauschwäbische Arbeitsgemeinschaft in Austria.
This immigration of the Danube Swabians to one specific location in Brazil would not have been possible without changes to Brazil’s immigration policy. The Brazilian government had restricted immigration through the implementation of a quota system in 1934 and then suspended immigration, with some exceptions, in 1941. After the end of World War II, however, the government again returned to an earlier emphasis on its need for foreign skilled labour and reopened immigration to the country.11 Aligned with the Western Bloc countries, Brazil was one of the main signatories to the agreement proposed by the United Nations to attract refugees and displaced persons from Europe. That coincided with the state’s interest in importing skilled labour for the development of agriculture and industry.12 The immigration of displaced Danube Swabians combined the commercial interests of Swiss exporters and industrialists with the Brazilian government’s interest in attracting qualified farmers.13 Consequently, the representative of Swiss Caritas in Rio de Janeiro, who was in charge of requesting authorization for the immigration of 20,000 families, and who was also responsible for submitting a colonization plan to the Brazilian government, not only highlighted the problem of refugees in Austria but also the suitability of Danube Swabians as colonizers in Brazil.14
In 1950, after several months of study, the committee set up to facilitate the settlement of the Danube Swabians in Goiás, central-western Brazil, came to the conclusion that the project was unfeasible, mainly because of the unfavourable location of the available area. That, however, did not end the project. The state government of Paraná, which was interested in revitalizing agricultural production in the area of Guarapuava, became eager to offer the refugees its support, and thus the decision was made to settle them in the town of Entre Rios.
To make room for these colonists, the Paraná government expropriated a livestock farming area of 22,000 hectares in Entre Rios and recruited primarily Danube-Swabian farmers in Austria to transform it. Between May 1951 and February 1952, seven transports brought 2,446 Danube Swabians to the area. The modest number, much smaller than the Brazilian government had initially wished to admit, reflects the limits imposed by Brazilian budgetary and administrative-bureaucratic restrictions relating to the immigration of refugees.15
The great majority of these immigrants came from Sirmium-Slavonia, but also from Batschka, the Yugoslav and Romanian parts of Banat, from Hungary, and from other parts of Yugoslavia and Romania. They were initially divided into five villages, four Catholic and one evangelical. The colony was coordinated by the newly founded Cooperativa Agrária (producer cooperative), which was directed by an agronomist, Michael Moor, who was also a Danube Swabian, originally from Sirmium. Moor had been the leader of a cooperative of Danube Swabians in the city of Esseg (now located in Croatia), also called Agrária, and he was involved in the study groups related to the implementation of the colony in Brazil.16
Entre Rios was not the first German refugee colony founded in Paraná. Between 1933 and 1936, Jewish and political refugees from Germany migrated to northern Paraná and founded, along with other Germans, the colony of Rolândia. It was the product of initiatives by the German former Minister of the Interior and Justice, Erich Koch-Weser, and the former deputy of the Catholic party (Zentrum), Johannes Schauff, who was experienced in matters of colonization. Both settled there as well.17 However, while the German colony of Rolândia today promotes a history focused on refugees persecuted by National Socialism, Entre Rios invested in constructing a memory of a colony founded by German refugees who had been expelled by communism.
Between 1951 and 1954, two other foreign colonies, German-Russian Mennonites in Witmarsun and Dutch in Castrolanda, were founded with the support of the Paraná state government. In these cases also, instead of the negative characteristics associated with immigration that had dominated during World War II, positive attributes associated with the quality of German immigrant labour prevailed among the authorities responsible for immigration and colonization in Paraná. Such immigrants were once again valued, and in this respect, the support for the settlement of the Danube Swabians in Paraná is an example of the continuity of an immigration policy in Paraná aimed at attracting European labour, which was viewed in Brazil at the time as a valuable asset.18
This was, however, still a tenuous view, one that had to overcome the discourses of the previous decades, which had been dominated by an anti-German sentiment. In the case of the Danube Swabians, the state government of Paraná highlighted their experience in the production of cereal crops, and the news of Danube-Swabian immigration was reported cautiously in the public sphere. As historian Marcos Stein has shown, when these immigrants arrived in Paraná in 1951, the press rarely referred to the Danube Swabians as ‘Germans’, but underscored their skills in the production of wheat.19 Rather than stressing the immigrants’ character the press emphasized their condition, using terms such as ‘war refugees’ and ‘stateless’, which could be linked to humanitarian aid, a notion that had strong advocates among those arguing for the settlement of refugees and displaced persons in Brazil.
This was a striking transformation. During the Nationalization Campaign of the 1930s, measures had been taken by the Brazilian government to repress Nazi ideology in Brazil. In particular, after Brazil’s entry into World War II on the side of the Allies in 1942, a strong anti-German rhetoric was introduced into the public sphere and repressive measures were implemented against German, Italian and Japanese citizens.20 However, in 1953, when the state of Paraná celebrated one hundred years of political emancipation from the province of São Paulo, only positive words were used to describe the newly founded colony of Entre Rios. In an article on immigration and colonization included in a book to celebrate the centenary, José Nicolau dos Santos, a professor of geography at the Federal University of Paraná, highlighted the cooperative attitudes, the ‘technical and cultural preparation’ and the ‘coordinated and efficient working methods’ of the settlers in Entre Rios.21 Santos concluded by quoting portions of a report prepared by another geographer, who, after visiting Entre Rios, advised the state government: ‘If an initiative like this, which resulted in the settlement of two thousand Germans around Guarapuava, was repeated and multiplied, this country would be organized overnight’.22
During the first two years of the colony of Entre Rios, work was carried out collectively and the allocation of land was by lottery. Not everything progressed seamlessly. The risk of not being allocated land, and the overuse of land division, became permanent sources of discontent within the colony. According to Albert Elfes, an agronomist engineer who specialized in colonization projects in Brazil, other later difficulties at Entre Rios included financial crises, technical difficulties, lack of guidance and lack of confidence in the leaders of the cooperative.23
By 1971, 54% of those who had immigrated had left the colony of Entre Rios and headed either to large Brazilian cities or returned to West Germany. The geographer Anton Hochgatterer cites two important periods for this exodus: first, the early years up to 1954, and second, between 1958 and 1969. The most important factors shaping the second phase were the partitioning of land through inheritance, the German ‘economic miracle’, and the law of reparations for the expelled ( Lastenausgleichsgesetz ).24
In 1968, faced with problems related to the partitioning of land, the cooperative initiated reforms aimed at increasing the size of farms by buying more land outside the colony and implementing an internal restructuring of the land. As a consequence, the area of arable land tripled.25 Because of this, and also because of the increased productivity of wheat, rice and soybeans in the colony, Entre Rios became a benchmark, both for Brazilian politicians and analysts of the agricultural economy, and for those of German origin in Brazil. It was seen not only as a ‘model colony’ but also as a reference point for agricultural projects in the country.26 The cooperative also invested at a later date in the expansion of the industrial park, with the creation in 1980 of Agromalte S.A, which in 1989 became the largest malting plant in South America.27
Due to the growing economic importance of the Agrária cooperative, there was an increased influx of non-Swabian labour into Entre Rios to work in the industrial sector and as permanent or seasonal agricultural workers. This population was added to the descendants of the old farm workers who lived in Entre Rios before the arrival of the immigrants. In 1989, the number of non-Swabian inhabitants in Entre Rios was estimated at 10,000.28 Despite the rising number of non-Swabian workers in the colony, it was the past that had been experienced by the Danube Swabians themselves that provided the foundation for a hegemonic discourse on memory concerning Entre Rios and also within the colony itself. An exception is the book Pioneiros do vale do Entre Rios (Pioneers of the Valley of Entre Rios), published in 1992 by a member of a farming family of Portuguese descent in Entre Rios, which presents a local history that runs counter to that narrated by the Danube Swabians. The author names the owners of plots of land occupied in the nineteenth century in Entre Rios as ‘pioneers’ of that location, a term generally associated with immigrants, and he refers to the handing over of farms by the government of Paraná for the founding of the colony, in 1951, as ‘expropriation’.29 Nevertheless, the vast majority of publications about Entre Rios have associated the location solely with the Danube Swabians. Unlike other German colonies in Brazil, however, the memories and representations of identities in Entre Rios, which claimed that the Danube Swabians were the ‘creators of a colonizing work’,30 were heavily based on their experiences as refugees after World War II and on the idea of the loss of the old Heimat (homeland).
Next: II. Flucht und Vertreibung in Religious Practices
Footnotes:
8 On the origin of the term, see J. Gappmaier, Entre Rios: Agrargeographie der Donauschwabensiedlung in Paraná- Brasilien (Dissertation, Univesity of Salzburg, 1987), p. 213.
9 Regarding the Prinz Eugen SS Division, see T. Casagrande, Die Volksdeutschen SS-Division Prinz Eugen: Die Banater Schwaben und die Nationalsozialistischen Kriegsverbrechen (Frankfurt/Main, 2003).
10 See, Meyer, ‘Hohn für die Opfer’, in S. Aust and S. Burgdorff (eds), Die Flucht: Über die Vertreibung der Deutschen aus dem Osten (Bonn, 2005), pp. 99–102.
11 A. Hochgatterer, Entre Rios: Donauschwäbische Siedlung in Südbrasilien (Salzburg, 1986), p. 44.
12 M.R.R. Salles, ‘A política imigratória brasileira no pós-Segunda Guerra Mundial e os refugiados: uma leitura da Revista Imigração e Colonização’, Cena Internacional, 9, 2 (2007), pp. 184–210.
13 A. Elfes, Campos Gerais: Estudo da colonização (Curitiba, 1973), p. 85.
14 M. Frösch, Guarapuava: Die donauschwäbische Flüchtlingssiedlung in Brasilien (Freilassing, 1958), p. 12.
15 J.H.F. Andrade, ‘O Brasil e a organização internacional para os refugiados (1946–1952)’, Revista Brasileira de Política Internacional, 48, 1 (1005), pp. 60–96.
16 Hochgatterer, Entre Rios , p. 42.
17 For more information about the colony of Rolândia, see, among more recent studies: P.J. Mainka, Roland und Rolândia im Nordosten von Paraná: Gründungs- und Frühgeschichte einer deutschen Kolonie in Brasilien (1932–1945 ) (São Paulo, 2008)
18 S. Nadalin, Paraná: ocupação do território, população e migrações (Curitiba, 2001), p. 88.
19 M. N. Stein, O oitavo dia: Produção de sentidos identitários na colônia Entre Rios—PR (segunda metade do século XX ) (Guarapuava, 2011), pp. 67–79.
20 For more on the repression of German citizens and their descendants during this period, see P.F. Perazzo, Prisioneiros de guerra: Os ‘Súditos do Eixo’ nos campos de concentração brasileiros (1942–1945 ) (São Paulo, 2009); P.F. Perazzo, O perigo alemão e a repressão policial no Estado Novo (São Paulo, 1999); M. Fáveri, Memórias de uma (outra) guerra: Cotidiano e medo durante a Segunda Guerra em Santa Catarina (Itajaí e Florianópolis, 2004); C.M. Campos, A política da língua na era Vargas: proibição do falar alemão e resistências no sul do Brasil (Campinas, 2006); K. Harms-Baltzer, Die Nationalisierung der deutschen Einwanderer und ihrer Nachkommen in Brasilien als Problem der deutsch-brasilianischen Beziehungen 1933–1938 (Berlin, 1970).
21 J. N. Santos, ‘Núcleos imigratórios e sistemas coloniais do Paraná’, in: 1º Centenário da Emancipação Política do Paraná (Curitiba, 1953), p. 99.
23 Elfes, Campos Gerais , p. 87–8.
24 Hochgatterer, Entre Rios , pp. 107–9.
25 H. Abeck, Entre Rios: Neue Heimat . Sonderdruck aus dem ‘Serra Post Kalender’ (Ijuí, 1973), no page number.
26 H. Abeck, Entre Rios (Ijuí, 1973), no page number; B.M. da Rocha, ‘Novas experiências nos Campos Gerais’, in A.P. Balhana, B.P. Machado et al. , Campos Gerais: estruturas agrárias (Curitiba, 1968).
27 G. Kohlhepp, ‘Espaço e Etnia’, Estudos Avançados, 5/11 (1991), pp. 136–7.
28 G. Kohlepp, ‘Raumwirksame Tätigkeit’, Staden Jahrbuch , 37/38 (1989/1990), p. 216.
29 S.M. Martins, Pioneiros do vale do Entre Rios (1818–1951 ) (Guarapuava, 1992), p. 15.
30 As the president of the cooperative, Mathias Leh, emphasized in the preamble of a book published in Germany: M. Leh, ‘Zum Geleit’, in S. Leicht and R. Vetter, Donauschwaben in Brasilien (Passau, 1982), p. 5.
DVHH < Destination: The Americas < Brazil < Entre Rios < Memory, resentment and the politization of trauma: narratives of World War II (Danube Swabians, Entre Rios, Guarapuava - Paraná) < I. Refugees and Colonizers: The Danube Swabians in Entre Rios
